• Featured artists include Lee Bul, Lee Mingwei, Yasumasa Morimura, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Danh Vo, Trevor Yeung, and more
• Picasso for Asia: A Conversation is the first major exhibition of Picasso in Hong Kong in more than a decade, marking the first time a museum collection from Asia is in dialogue with masterpieces from Musée national Picasso-Paris
• New exhibition of the M+ Sigg Collection and the third edition of the Sigg Prize
• M+ deepens its international collaborations with museum partners Musée national Picasso-Paris; Haus der Kunst München; The National Art Center, Tokyo; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; and Powerhouse, Sydney
• Second edition of the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival and new site-specific artist commissions on the M+ Facade, one of the world’s largest media facades

M+, Asia’s global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, announces its 2025 exhibition, cinema, and facade programmes for the coming year and beyond. The programmes encompass a range of disciplines, from painting and sculpture to photography and moving image. They highlight a series of new partnerships between M+ and renowned international institutions.

Co-curated by M+ and Musée national Picasso-Paris (MnPP), and co-presented with the French May Arts Festival, the Special Exhibition Picasso for Asia: A Conversation offers a new and groundbreaking interpretation of the legacy of Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) by placing more than sixty of his masterpieces, on loan from MnPP, in dialogue with around eighty works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists from the M+ Collections. The exhibition presents an unprecedented cross-cultural and intergenerational dialogue between the twentieth-century European master and contemporary Asian artists. The exhibition will open in March 2025.

Following the success of M+ Sigg Collection: Another Story, M+ Sigg Collection: Inner Worlds, the third exhibition of the collection, will focus on the evolution of media, language, and artistic approach in Chinese art from 1990 to 2012, the period in which art from China exploded onto the world stage. The new display spotlights key artists such as Chen Guangwu, Chu Yun, Duan Jianyu, Fang Lijun, Hu Xiaoyuan, Liang Yuanwei, Liu Wei, Liu Ye, Qiu Shihua, Shang Yang, Wang Jin, Yangjiang Group, and Zhao Bandi. The exhibition will open in August 2025.

In partnership with Haus der Kunst München, Special Exhibition Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now will present full-scale reproductions of the works of trailblazing women artists whose environments made a lasting impact on the history of visual art. Environments are artworks in which viewers play an active role as they move through and around the work, laying the groundwork for the immersive experiences that dazzle museum audiences today. The original exhibition was conceived and produced by Haus der Kunst München in 2023, and the M+ presentation will be augmented by a selection of environments by Asian women artists. The exhibition will open in September 2025.

To foster engagement with international cultural institutions, M+ is collaborating with multiple museums to co-produce and tour exhibitions in 2025. Japanese Contemporary Art and the World 1989–2010 (working title) is the first curatorial collaboration between The National Art Center, Tokyo (NACT) and M+. This exhibition will present a historical survey of Japanese contemporary art, bracketed by two major events in Japan’s recent past: the end of the Shōwa era (1926–1989) and the beginning of the Heisei period (1989–2019), and the Tōhoku Earthquake in 2011. Featuring iconic works of art and stories of lesser-known projects by artists during this period, the exhibition will present Japanese artists living inside and outside their native country alongside works by international artists. This exhibition will open in NACT in September 2025.

Co-curated by M+ and Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, Lee Bul: My Grand Narrative (working title) will debut at Leeum Museum of Art in September 2025, followed by a presentation at M+ in spring 2026 before touring to other international venues. Lee Bul (South Korean, born 1964) is one of the most prominent contemporary artists to have emerged from Asia in the last few decades. The exhibition will be the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s career to date, whose practice spans over four decades from the 1980s to the present day.

M+ will partner with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (CCA) to organise the exhibition Function, Economy, and (when possible) Beauty—Architecture of China 1949–1979, which will open at CCA in October 2025. Exploring the histories and narratives that underpin the first three decades of architecture in the People’s Republic of China, the exhibition will be a nuanced exploration of how architecture was built, used, and mediated in this period from multiple perspectives.

The critically acclaimed I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture, the first full-scale retrospective of the world-renowned architect Ieoh Ming Pei (American, born China, 1917–2019), will tour to Shanghai in 2025 after the M+ exhibition ends in January 2025. Since the exhibition first opened at M+ in June 2024, it has attracted approximately 130,000 visitors in its first three months. Following the success of M+’s first Special Exhibition, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, which toured to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain in 2023 and Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal in 2024, I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture is the second Special Exhibition to travel outside of Hong Kong.

Additional exhibitions

Danh Vo In Situ: Akari by Noguchi

M+ invites Danh Vo (Danish, born Vietnam, 1975) to take part in a long-term project transforming the museum’s Found Space, a dramatic concrete atrium that lies at the heart of the building, and the way in which it is experienced. Vo will use the space in organic and sustainable ways, reimagining it as a welcoming social zone that is also a stage for different programmes. The display will open in October 2024.

Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman: Masquerades

In a world first, M+ will bring together the photographic works of Yasumasa Morimura (Japanese, born 1951) and Cindy Sherman (American, born 1954) in a two-person exhibition. Both artists are renowned for their visual and conceptual strategies of masquerade, transforming their appearances to portray multiple identities that offer incisive commentary on contemporary culture and history. The exhibition will open in December 2024.

Lee Mingwei: Guernica in Sand

To coincide with Picasso for Asia: A Conversation, M+ will present Lee Mingwei: Guernica in Sand, a large-scale installation and performance in which Lee Mingwei (American, born Taiwan, 1964) recreates Picasso’s iconic 1937 masterpiece Guernica using sand. The display will open in March 2025.

Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture in Guangdong, 1900s–1970s

Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture in Guangdong, 1900s–1970s tells the story of twentieth-century Cantonese art in its full complexity as an important chapter in global modernism. Guangdong province was the birthplace of China’s modern revolution and a centre of radically new ways of seeing and thinking about art. Until the 1950s, artists frequently travelled between Guangdong and Hong Kong. Even as Hong Kong artists later embraced abstraction and other international trends, their sensibilities remain traceable to their Republican-period forebears. The exhibition will open in June 2025.

Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Detachments

Following its first showing as a Collateral Event at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, this commissioned solo exhibition by Trevor Yeung (Hong Kong, born 1988) returns to M+ in a new configuration. Restaged in a museum setting, Trevor Yeung: Courtyard of Detachments shifts focus to discuss larger environmental and systemic issues. This response exhibition is part of the sixth collaboration between M+ and Hong Kong Arts Development Council on Hong Kong’s presentation for the Biennale. The exhibition will open in June 2025.

Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition

Established in 2018, this prestigious prize is open to artists born or working in the Greater China region and its diasporas. For this third edition, the Sigg Prize 2025 exhibition will showcase the works of six leading contemporary artists selected by an international jury. The exhibition will open in September 2025 and the winning artist will be announced in early 2026.

Robert Rauschenberg and Asia

This exhibition brings together a selection of major works produced by Robert Rauschenberg (American, 1925–2008) during and in response to his time in Asia. An enthusiastic traveller, Rauschenberg was deeply impacted by the cultures with which he came into contact. His extended engagement with Japan began in the mid-1960s, and his residency in India in 1975 inspired new approaches to working with materials and colours. Following his first trip to China in 1982, he developed Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI), a global programme of travelling exhibitions and cultural dialogues. The M+ exhibition will open in November 2025 as part of global celebrations marking the centennial of the artist’s birth.

M+ Cinema programme

M+ Cinema offers a dynamic seasonal programme of weekly screenings, talks, and events exploring the multifaceted world of the moving image. From cutting-edge new releases to groundbreaking experimental works and rediscovered cinematic treasures, M+ Cinema examines critical themes shaping contemporary visual culture.

In Autumn Edition 2024, Tsui Hark, the Free-Spirited Trailblazer will spotlight Tsui Hark (Hong Kong, born Vietnam, 1951). The New Wave director radically reinvented classical film genres and has a pioneering approach to new technologies. This survey will be M+’s first focused presentation of a major Hong Kong auteur, featuring twelve films, a conversation between Tsui Hark and director, actress, and filmmaker Sylvia Chang, and multiple pre-screening introductions by the director.

Spring Edition 2025 will see the return of the annual Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival, celebrating diverse moving image practices that have shaped Asia’s artistic landscape over the past sixty years. The three-day event will comprise screenings, exhibitions, performances, talks, workshops, and live acts, exploring cross-cultural and intergenerational lineages in Asian avant-garde filmmaking.

M+ Facade commissions

M+ Facade, one of Hong Kong’s waterfront landmarks, will exhibit four new site-specific commissions by contemporary artists and makers. During the Winter Edition 2025 of the M+ Cinema, audiences can enjoy Jade Jadeite (2024) by artist Zhou Tao (Chinese, born 1976), a fluid montage featuring scenes of the waterways that connect the communities along the Pearl River and Hong Kong.

Spring Edition 2025 will present M+’s flagship co-commission with Art Basel, while Autumn Edition 2025 will see the launch of the museum’s first co-commission with Powerhouse, Sydney, featuring Ayoung Kim (South Korean, born 1979), who will respond to the structures and systems of retail environments.

Suhanya Raffel, Museum Director, M+, celebrating a successful 2024 and looking ahead as the museum enters its fourth year, says, ‘M+ has reached significant milestones in its third year as we established important collaborations with leading museums around the world and opened institution-defining exhibitions, which were years in the making. Our 2025 lineup of exhibitions and programmes will continue to foreground iconic contemporary visionaries around the world, amplifying the museum’s presence on the international stage and further strengthening M+’s position as Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture.’

M+ is also pleased to announce a change of title for two leadership roles at the museum’s executive level. These changes reflect M+’s maturing institutional stature. Doryun Chong is now Artistic Director and Chief Curator, M+, and Veronica Castillo is Director, Collection and Exhibition, M+. The changes in title are effective as of Thursday, 10 October 2024. Chong will continue to oversee all curatorial activities and programmes at M+, including collections development, exhibition development, learning and public programmes, publications, and digital initiatives across the museum’s three main disciplinary areas of design and architecture, moving image, and visual art. Castillo will continue to oversee her three departmental divisions of Collection, Archives and Library; Conservation; and Exhibitions, including international touring and partnerships. Chong and Castillo will continue to support Raffel, who leads M+ as one of the most distinctive, successful, and innovative voices to emerge in the museum world today.

About M+

M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District (WestK), it is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. M+ is a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.

About the West Kowloon Cultural District (WestK)

WestK is one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong on forty hectares of reclaimed land located alongside Victoria Harbour. With a varied mix of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, WestK produces and hosts world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, providing twenty-three hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.